Are We Pandemic Ready?

Covid was a collective trauma. I was based in Berlin then and still remember the day Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, announced the lockdown. The rest is history: Home-schooling, masks, PCR tests, apocalyptically empty airports, the stories of friends’ parents passing away alone in hospitals and care homes. It was hard.

Which is why recent reports of two other virus outbreaks — hantavirus and Ebola — are so triggering. Is this the next Covid, a friend asked me. It isn’t. But my colleague Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter, explains why that is not exactly a reason to relax.

Are we ready for a potential pandemic?

By Apoorva Mandavilli

For many people, the past month has brought unpleasant echoes of Covid: Mysterious deaths aboard a cruise ship, a virus that causes a deadly respiratory illness and talk of forced quarantines. Before it had even become clear to scientists that the recent outbreak of hantavirus was not going to cause another pandemic, there was news of a rapidly escalating Ebola outbreak in central Africa, with hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of deaths.

Neither of these outbreaks is likely to ravage the world as the coronavirus did. The hantavirus can cause severe illness and death, but it’s not particularly contagious and tends to fizzle out. The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo is scarier, but even that is likely to stay confined, for the most part, to Congo and its immediate neighbors, according to the World Health Organization.

Still, together, they remind us all that outbreaks are inevitable and that the world needs to prepare to snuff them out before they turn into pandemics. This was among the most pressing issues on the minds of health officials from all over the world who gathered last week for the annual meeting of the W.H.O.

The meeting kicked off with a new report suggesting that outbreaks are not only occurring more frequently, they’re also becoming more damaging — and the world is increasingly struggling to fight and recover from them.

The importance of cooperation

In some ways, we are in a much better place to tackle outbreaks than we were before Covid. Scientists have developed the ability to analyze new pathogens with breathtaking speed and accuracy and to make new vaccines remarkably quickly.

But Covid also divided the world. Richer countries hogged vaccines, giving out booster doses to their citizens before many in poorer countries received their first dose. Within many countries, policies on lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates created political rifts and deepened mistrust in scientists.

These trends have intensified. One benchmark: Vaccines against the mpox virus reached low-income nations nearly two years after that outbreak began in 2022 — even slower than the shots for Covid did.

The challenge is apparent in the tortured negotiations, which also began in 2022, over a new pandemic treaty. Low-income countries have said they are willing to swiftly share genetic sequences and samples of emerging pathogens — but only in exchange for equitable access to the tests, vaccines and treatments that are developed with that information. Richer countries have been unwilling to offer those guarantees.

America exits

The biggest blow to global health unspooled last year, when the Trump administration abruptly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and ended the vast majority of foreign aid, shifting instead to agreements with individual countries, often with strings attached. The administration also withdrew from the W.H.O. and rejected a global framework that obligates countries to report outbreaks.

The impact of these decisions is becoming increasingly obvious. American officials were not among those investigating the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship, and they initiated their response nearly a month after the first death. And they only learned of the new Ebola outbreak nine days after the W.H.O. first received the signal and alerted other global health authorities.

The U.S. was once the undisputed leader in any outbreak. It coordinated the response, provided funding and expertise, and pushed partners to move faster. The Ebola epidemic already suggests that the lack of American leadership translates at the very least to weaker surveillance of infectious diseases, delays in testing and a lack of crucial protective gear for health care workers on the front lines.

As the World Health Assembly drew to a close, health officials from all over the world left Geneva with urgent, painful reminders of the need to prepare for the next pandemic. Absent from all the discussions: the United States.

But viruses don’t respect borders, and as the world responds to Ebola and hantavirus, cross-country cooperation remains crucial to global health.

Related: Our chief Africa correspondent, Declan Walsh, flew aboard a United Nations peacekeepers’ plane into Bunia, a city in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo that has become the heart of the Ebola crisis. Here’s what he found.

MORE TOP NEWS

The pope weighs in on A.I.

Pope Leo XIV issued a 42,300-word papal encyclical warning leaders to protect humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects. Addressing “all people of good will,” the pope called for the protection of human dignity as technology increasingly replaces people in professional and social roles.

Pope Leo also apologized for the Vatican’s role in slavery, acknowledging the papacy’s failure to condemn the slave trade and its support for rulers who engaged in it.

Leo presented the encyclical alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the A.I. company Anthropic. Read what it said here.

OTHER NEWS

Iran’s top negotiators arrived in Qatar for talks on a possible peace deal with the U.S.; President Trump gave conflicting signals over the progress of negotiations. Follow our live updates.
Hezbollah’s leader called on Lebanese citizens to “take to the streets” over their government’s direct talks with Israel, as Israel intensified strikes on southern Lebanon.
The U.S. oil blockade has left millions of Cubans without cooking gas, forcing them to resort to charcoal and firewood.
With about 1,500 ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, clearing the backlog of vessels will take weeks or even months, even if the U.S. and Iran were to reach a deal to reopen the strait.

Top of The World

The most clicked link in your newsletter yesterday was about the vagus nerve.

SPORTS

Football: Lionel Messi left his final game before the World Cup with an apparent injury.

Tennis: Gaël Monfils of France played in what could be his last professional singles match at the French Open. Follow our live updates from Day 2 of the tournament.

PHRASE OF THE DAY

“Property guardianship”

A concept that has become popular in London as housing costs have soared. Residents, known as guardians, pay licensing fees to rent otherwise vacant buildings, like empty churches and out-of-business pubs, for significantly less than market rates.

MORNING READ

After years of driving a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW, Li Maozai, a partner at a law firm in the southern Chinese city of Nanchang, made a choice that surprised even himself: He bought a Chinese luxury car, the Maextro S800.

Chinese people are flocking to homegrown luxury brands, drawn by more reasonable prices, cutting-edge technology and a sensibility tuned to local tastes. “Today, Chinese consumers are no longer looking up to Western culture,” one investor said. Richemont, the parent company of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, reported a 23 percent sales decline in China last year. Porsche said it would close nearly half of its dealerships. Powered by devotees like Mr. Li, the Maextro has become China’s best-selling luxury car. Read more.

AROUND THE WORLD

Japan’s oyster farmers throw a good party

In Japan, especially outside the cities, people still live, gather and eat by the seasons. On the Itoshima Peninsula, a 30-minute train ride from Fukuoka, fishermen welcome travelers to enjoy the fresh catch the local way.

At pop-up oyster shops known as kakigoya, families and friends gather over grills, ready to receive oysters straight from the water. “Our family has always worked along the seaside. We used to farm sea bream until the price of feed got too expensive to be profitable,” one farmer said. “So we became oyster farmers, and we’re still here today.” Join one of their parties.

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RECIPE

This insalata verde from the New York City restaurant Via Carota uses five carefully chosen greens — endive, butter lettuce, frisée, romaine heart and watercress, piled as high as gravity will allow. The secret to its mouth-smacking perfection is an unlikely ingredient: warm water, which softens the vinegar’s bite.